Another week, another edition of Whewell’s Gazette the weekly #histSTM links list bringing you all of the histories of science, technology and medicine that we could dredge up out of the depths of cyberspace over the last seven days.

Popular myth implies that Charles Darwin somehow came up with his theory of evolution by natural selection in splendid isolation, the classic lone genius. As with all lone genius narratives this is of course rubbish. Even before his voyage on the Beagle, as a young man, he was already well known in nineteenth-century natural history circles, which is why he was recommended for the post at all. Following his return, despite his withdrawal to Down House, he became a leading in the natural history community, corresponding widely with other experts in the field.

One of Darwin’s closest friends and collaborators was the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was born two hundred years ago on 30 June 1817. In his own way Dalton deserves to be as well known, as Darwin but isn’t.

An 1854 illustration showing Hooker with his Lepcha collectors in Sikkim (Mezzotint by William Walker after a painting by Frank Stone)Source: Wikimedia Commons

The son of Sir William Hooker, who was also a famous botanist, he undertook expeditions to the Antarctic between 1839 and 1843, was botanist on the Geological Survey of Great Britain 1846/47. He undertook voyages to the Himalayas and India from 1847 to 1851, Palestine 1860, Morocco 1871 and the US in 1877. He became an assistant director of the Royal Botanical Gardens in Kew and succeeded his father as director 1865. He was awarded the Royal Medal in 1854, the Copley Medal in 1887 and the Darwin Medal in 1892 was President of the Royal Society and received numerous other awards and honours. His publications were extensive and genre defining.

Herbert Spencer gave J.D. Hooker a cutthroat razor. A Hooker family heirloom

Quotes of the week:

“In London everyone is different, and that means anyone can fit in” – Paddington Bear

“Wine is sunlight, held together by water” – Galileo Galilei

“I hate when people say “you’ll be on the wrong side of history.” As though the goal of our lives is to be judged well by future strangers” – Existential Comics (@existentialcoms)

“”Champagne Socialist” = “Person who supports policies that will in no way benefit them because they’re the right thing to do”. Odd insult” – Nick Pettigrew (@Nick_Pettigrew)

“Man in his arrogance thinks himself a great work worthy the interposition of a Deity. More humble and I believe truer to consider him created from animals” – Charles Darwin, 1838

“In what manner the mental powers were first developed is as hopeless an enquiry as how life itself first originated. These are problems for the distant future if ever they are to be solved by man” – Charles Darwin 1871

“The passage from the physics of the brain to the corresponding facts of consciousness is unthinkable” – John Tyndall 1868

“A book index that misidentifies pages is like a lover who lies about an assignation” – Liam Heneghan (@DublinSoil)

“If history teaches us anything, it is that no matter how evil a state is, once it has been reformed, a sizable proportion will later idolise it the way it was” – John S. Wilkins (@john_s_wilkins)

“Genius without education is like silver in the mine” – Benjamin Franklin

“Geography is the eye of history”- Hakluyt’s dedication to Sir Walter Raleigh in his English trans. of “De orbe novo decades” in 1612

“I come from the school of thought that believes that the universe was formed in Zagreb. I’m a Croatianist” – Sanjeev Kohli (@govindajeggy)

“One should never mistake pattern for meaning”– Iain M. Banks

“I have spent a lot of this year trying to convince taxi drivers that being an academic is extremely glamorous…” – Sara Barker (@DrSKBarker)

Evacuation of Dr. Ronald S. Shemenski from the British Antarctic Survey Rothera Research Station, April 26, 2001. The airlift operation was the riskiest rescue effort ever by a small plane to the South Pole, as the weather makes any flights to the South Pole extremely hazardous from late Februray until November. (AP Photo/British Antarctic Survey) Photograph: AP

By the end of the IGY in 1958, Antarctica’s population had risen dramatically thanks to the sudden proliferation of science bases. Illustration: Tom Woolley Illustration/Scott Polar Research Institute, University of Cambridge